The main reason to attend An Event Apart is to learn a ton of exciting web stuff, right? Attendees want to write better code, make more beautiful websites, and serve their users more thoughtfully. The food is delicious, admittedly, but it is merely a perk of the core experience.

Indeed, there were many other perks besides tasty crème brûlée, including many speakers’ off-hand references that made me want to pull up Wikipedia. Since I prefer to take my notes on paper and focus on the speaker, I was luckily not distracted by these references at the time, and instead noted them for later investigation.

After the jump, check out an expanded list from what I originally wrote in my notes. I could not help going back through presentation slides to find even more tidbits. All items link to Wikipedia first; some also link to a corporate or more helpful site, when appropriate. Though some references are less obscure than others, the entire list gives good impression of the variety of interests represented by An Event Apart’s fantastic speakers.

Shoo! Not sure about you, but I think that is a lot of reading to do. If you are able to get through all the Wikipedia pages, I imagine you are now that much more qualified for (geeky) pub trivia. In any case, from the list above, it is clear that the speakers at An Event Apart are not the sort of people who constantly code without opening their eyes to the rest of the world.